Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley [whitelam books .txt] 📗

he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?” He halted in front of her, with arms extended in a questioning gesture. Mrs. Viveash slightly shrugged her shoulders. She really didn’t know; she couldn’t answer. “Ah, but that’s all nonsense,” he burst out again, “all rot. I want to be happy and contented and successful; and of course I should work better if I were. And I want, oh, above everything, everything, I want you: to possess you completely and exclusively and jealously and forever. And the desire is like rust corroding my heart, it’s like moth eating holes in the fabric of my mind. And you merely laugh.” He threw up his hands and let them limply fall again.

“But I don’t laugh,” said Mrs. Viveash. On the contrary, she was very sorry for him; and, what was more, he rather bored her. For a few days, once, she had thought she might be in love with him. His impetuosity had seemed a torrent strong enough to carry her away. She had found out her mistake very soon. After that he had rather amused her: and now he rather bored her. No, decidedly, she never laughed. She wondered why she still went on seeing him. Simply because one must see someone? or why? “Are you going to go on with my portrait?” she asked.

Lypiatt sighed. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose I’d better be getting on with my work. Work⁠—it’s the only thing. ‘Portrait of a Tigress.’ ” The cynical Titan spoke again. “Or shall I call it, ‘Portrait of a Woman who has never been in Love?’ ”

“That would be a very stupid title,” said Mrs. Viveash.

“Or, ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Heart Disease’? That would be good, that would be damned good!” Lypiatt laughed very loudly and slapped his thighs. He looked, Mrs. Viveash thought, peculiarly ugly when he laughed. His face seemed to go all to pieces; not a corner of it but was wrinkled and distorted by the violent grimace of mirth. Even the forehead was ruined when he laughed. Foreheads are generally the human part of people’s faces. Let the nose twitch and the mouth grin and the eyes twinkle as monkeyishly as you like; the forehead can still be calm and serene, the forehead still knows how to be human. But when Casimir laughed, his forehead joined in the general disintegrating grimace. And sometimes even when he wasn’t laughing, when he was just vivaciously talking, his forehead seemed to lose its calm and would twitch and wrinkle itself in a dreadful kind of agitation. ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Heart Disease’⁠—she didn’t find it so very funny.

“The critics would think it was a problem picture,” Lypiatt went on. “And so it would be, by God, so it would be. You are a problem. You’re the Sphinx. I wish I were Oedipus and could kill you.”

All this mythology! Mrs. Viveash shook her head.

He made his way through the intervening litter and picked up a canvas that was leaning with averted face against the wall near the window. He held it out at arm’s length and examined it, his head critically cocked on one side. “Oh, it’s good,” he said softly. “It’s good. Look at it.” And, stepping out once more into the open, he propped it up against the table so that Mrs. Viveash could see it without moving from her chair.

It was a stormy vision of her; it was Myra seen, so to speak, through a tornado. He had distorted her in the portrait, had made her longer and thinner than she really was, had turned her arms into sleek tubes and put a bright, metallic polish on the curve of her cheek. The figure in the portrait seemed to be leaning backwards a little from the surface of the canvas, leaning sideways too, with the twist of an ivory statuette carved out of the curving tip of a great tusk. Only somehow in Lypiatt’s portrait the curve seemed to lack grace, it was without point, it had no sense.

“You’ve made me look,” said Mrs. Viveash at last, “as though I were being blown out of shape by the wind.” All this show of violence⁠—what was the point of it? She didn’t like it, she didn’t like it at all. But Casimir was delighted with her comment. He slapped his thighs and once more laughed his restless, sharp-featured face to pieces.

“Yes, by God,” he shouted, “by God, that’s right! Blown out of shape by the wind. That’s it: you’ve said it.” He began stamping up and down the room again, gesticulating. “The wind, the great wind that’s in me.” He struck his forehead. “The wind of life, the wild west wind. I feel it inside me, blowing, blowing. It carries me along with it; for though it’s inside me, it’s more than I am, it’s a force that comes from somewhere else, it’s Life itself, it’s God. It blows me along in the teeth of opposing fate, it makes me work on, fight on.” He was like a man who walks along a sinister road at night and sings to keep up his own spirits, to emphasize and magnify his own existence. “And when I paint, when I write or improvise my music, it bends the things I have in my mind, it pushes them in one direction, so that everything I do has the look of a tree that streams northeast with all its branches and all its trunk from the root upwards, as though it were trying to run from before the Atlantic gale.”

Lypiatt stretched out his two hands and, with fingers splayed out to the widest and trembling in the excessive tension of the muscles, moved them slowly upwards and sideways, as though he were running his palms up the stem of a little wind-wizened tree on a hilltop above the ocean.

Mrs. Viveash continued to look at the unfinished portrait. It was as noisy and easy and immediately effective as